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Sweet Virginia is a rock-solid crime noir film

SWEET VIRGINIA (Jamie M. Dagg). 93 minutes. Opens Friday (December 1). See listing. Rating: NNNN 


After the breathless pace of his first feature River – which starred Rossif Sutherland as an American doctor running for his life in Laos – director Jamie M. Dagg takes his time with Sweet Virginia. It’s the right call for the material.

Set in a small Alaska town, the film employs the classic noir structure of a crime of opportunity that spirals out of control. The script, by Benjamin and Paul China, introduces us to everyone involved, carefully sets them on a collision course with one another… and then just waits for the fireworks. 

The mechanics of the plot are not unlike Blood Simple, but Dagg and the China brothers brush away Joel and Ethan Coen’s mordant humour to focus on the small moments of connection and humanity (or lack thereof) – among the handful of characters. 

The Punisher’s Jon Bernthal and James White’s Christopher Abbott are low-key terrific as a motel owner and a dead-eyed stranger who strike up a doomed friendship – you can picture John Wayne and Lee Van Cleef playing these parts in a 50s western.

Rosemarie DeWitt is rock-solid, as always, as a newly widowed woman with whom Bernthal’s character is uncomfortably close. And Imogen Poots makes the most of the smallish role of a naive young wife whose solution to all of her problems snowballs into an avalanche.

And Dagg just lets it all breathe, building tension as people kill time in diners and motel rooms, hinting that something terrible is coming but not telling us how or when. That’s exactly what this material needs. 

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